Known printed and online user manuals provide step-by-step execution instructions, but (1) they cannot be altered by end-users, and (2) each relevant process step instruction does not appear dynamically as a given user executes the given process. Foe example, Microsoft's Office Assistant can offer context sensitive (i.e., dynamic) instructional help, but these instructions cannot be modified/customized by a given user; every user sees the same instructional help.
Web annotations, such as the Object Service Architecture, Web Annotation Service, provides a way for users to associate user-defined annotation (e.g., notes and comments) with web pages, the annotations and web pages provided by distinct network services but do not provide dynamic user-defined process step annotations (only web pages).
U.S. Pat. No. 6,687,878 discussed annotations of a document, not a process. WO0190928 discussed annotations of a word or group of words. United States Patent Application 2005/0038788 discussed preventing sensitive information from being divulged in an annotation. United States Patent Application US20030023679A1 (System and process for network collaboration through embedded annotation and rendering instructions) discussed a scheme that enables collaborators to work together on network accessible “collaboration content.” This shared object includes a collaborator-specified annotation but it does not provide dynamic user-defined process step annotations.
A publication by Dourish, P., Edwards, W., Lamarca, A., Lamping, J., Petersen, K., Salisbury, M., Terry, D., and Thornton, J. “Extending Document Management Systems with User-Specific Active Properties,”, ACM Transactions on Information Systems, Vol. 18, No. 2, April 2000, Pages 140-170 provides a method for collaborators to assign properties to documents and then have these properties used to manage the documents, the properties including sharing rights, versioning and annotations. No method is described, however, providing dynamic user-defined process step annotations, the method only describing how annotations can be associated with documents, not process steps. Also no method is provided to automatically detect when a given annotation should be displayed.
Contextual Collaboration, such as that described in Lei, H., Chakraborty, D., Chang, H., Dikun M. J., Heath, T., Li, J. S., Nayak, N., and Patnaik, Y. “Contextual Collaboration: Platform and Applications,” Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Services Computing (SCC '04), IBSN 0-7695-2225-4/04, provides a method of providing collaborative applications (e.g., a chat session) when users reach particular states, particularly stages in business transactions. It does not, however, provide any means for an individual user to associate one or more annotations with a given process-step.
Thus, there remains a need for a system and method that allow a user to annotate the steps of a process and wherein the associated annotations appear automatically when the user re-executes the process in the future.